Soooo, build bathrooms and make them free (as in beer)?
The solution will require much more than some free-to-use restrooms.
So really, we just don’t have enough, and I don’t think anyone really cares if people are actually shooting up drugs in a bathroom. That’s better than doing it in playgrounds or on park trails and leaving the needles strewn around.
It isn’t that we can’t. It completely makes sense to open up more public restrooms. We are simply choosing not to and making excuses for our choices. “The solution” is nothing. If you want people living in the streets to take a dump somewhere other than just the streets, give them a place to actually do it. Make them common. Make them regular. Make them staffed. Make them clean and well plumbed. Make them high throughout so any member of the public can use them. And even add biohazard collection bins if you feel it is necessary.
Our society’s attitude is “if you don’t pay taxes, you don’t deserve help.” That’s so morally wrong I can’t even explain it without going red in the face, but that’s the situation we’re in.
If you spend $100k and lift 9/10 people out of homelessness, that terrible math shows you spent $100k per homeless person.
Think about it, if there was a threshold and somehow spending $1 more per year reduced the number of homeless by 50%, that metric would get worse.
It's fine to make the argument that the outcomes are bad but it's lazy and ignorant to divide two unrelated numbers and declare yourself outraged.
Spend some time working with the thousands of underpaid and overworked social/case workers and volunteers in SF if only to get a sense of the scale of the problem.
It’s not about the amount of money, it’s about summoning the political will to implement programs that sound counter-intuitive but attack the root of the problem while spending far less money.
A few examples:
- Safe injection sites reduce crime, restrict the spread of blood-borne diseases, and are cheaper than most forms of outreach. When combined with access to detox and treatment programs, they’re more effective and almost certainly cheaper than police and paramedics responding to hundreds of overdoses a day.
- Homeless shelters as designed are dangerous and ineffective at helping people transition from living on the street. A more effective solution is to provide longer-term, smaller scale housing. Lack of housing stability severely impairs an otherwise capable person’s ability to find a job. While the cost-per-person for such a program would be higher than shelters, I suspect it would actually save money by reducing the amount of time a person needs benefits.
- Mental health. Mental health. Mental health. We ignore the problem and marginalize mentally ill people from society; which leads to homelessness. There are not enough case workers to deal with the problem, and they are so underpaid that most aren’t far removed from homelessness themselves. We also have to recognize that some people will never be capable of independent living — giving them benefits is not “enabling” their bad habits, it’s taking care of a person who cannot take care of themselves.
- Too many outreach programs use a “carrot and stick” approach to providing benefits. For people dealing with profound mental health issues, they may not be capable of meeting whatever requirements are placed upon them, despite their best efforts. The efforts of ensuring compliance with “carrot and stick” programs add costs and reduce the impact of every dollar spent.
- A political recognition and acceptance that some people will try to game the system. Some will be successful. That doesn’t mean these programs are ineffective — provide the benefits, investigate the fraud and prosecute the offenders. We have laws against this kind of fraud already. We don’t need new, complex compliance mechanisms.
The net here is that homeless people’s lives are often in an out-of-control spiral of helplessness and marginalization that generates an existential level of stress. Unless we can break that spiral by providing a stable, safe environment, the homeless problem will only get worse. It takes the political will to actually help people rather than paper over the problem.
There is shit in the streets, now. If you’re fine with shit continuing to be in the streets, then sure, if the measure comes up to do something about it, go ahead and vote it down. Frankly it is largely in the parts of town I don’t frequent these days, I don’t even have much of a vested interest, but I do have enough pride in my city to at the very least, not want people and their shit to remain on the streets.
Let's assume we do install these toilets. These won't be cheap toilets, they will, for a large percentage of their time in service, essentially be "hard living facilities for the mentally ill". Homeless people and vagrants put very strange objects into public toilets in SF, breaking them constantly. The San Francisco public library had to install grinders[1] to handle the load homeless people were putting on public toilets. And this was after they began to constantly monitor the restrooms[2][3]. How many public toilets should we build and how much should we spend on each one per year?
[1] I can't find the source for the grinders but I do recall reading about the installation of them a few years back, maybe someone can provide a link. [2] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-main-library-t... [3] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-library-s-main-br...
So we have a problem, where we have a large homeless population, many of them addicted to drugs, and literally shitting in the streets. If you don’t have strong nerves, you might find yourself facing a difficult choice between knowing your kid is going to come up against this environment, and possibly encounter needles, or just leaving the city entirely. I’m not telling you or anyone to leave, but it might not be for you. I made it to adulthood without any blood born illnesses from getting stuck with a needle. Nobody killed me in a public restroom, you have a data point of one.
So hey, this is a pretty innovative community, if the bathrooms we have right now are inadequate in every measurable manner, and we’re worried about them becoming hard living shelters, then what combination of police powers, patrols, tech and community reporting forums do we need to prevent that? Is the problem unsolvable or have we just made peace with shit in the streets and don’t want to rock the boat?
Its also a form of restroom that is common in many other countries. Such a type of toilet is not new.
The former is not preferable because it spreads disease, and instills disdain for the homeless among the community thus decreasing willingness to dedicate resources towards services helping the homeless (thus hurting those homeless that do try to maintain good hygiene).
Not to mention, you have a very negative and prejudiced view of the homeless if you think that they desire to cause harm to the city. The overwhelming majority of homeless are not the spiteful, antisocial people you seem to believe them to be. They may often resort to harmful activity to survive (e.g. theft) but rarely have I seen them cause harm for no reason but to make other people suffer. Maybe things like leaving trash strewn about after scavenging through it, but that's more negligent than spiteful.
Regardless that's largely tangential to the ridiculous claim you made earlier that open defecation is somehow better for the community than using a squat toilet. Not only are you advocating a highly unsanitary activity that can easily lead to hepatitis outbreaks for example (which would disproportionately affect people living on the streets), you're portraying the homeless as some sort of spiteful group that wants to deliberately inflict suffering on the rest of society. I cannot fathom why you thought that comment was productive.
The reason I ask is this:
If they do understand the impact, then they're intentionally endangering public health, harming quality of life for the city's other inhabitants, and possibly committing a crime for which they are of sound mind and body to be (hopefully) held accountable.
And if they don't understand the impact of this choice, odds are that the same applies their other various life choices as well. And if that's indeed the case, can we as a society please stop treating their choice to live on the streets as one that should be respected? We wouldn't let a child make that decision on their own, so why should we let someone whose mental faculties are arguably just as lacking, if not more so?
I'm not arguing that homelessness should be a crime for which people should be jailed. In fact I'm aware already that the courts in the US have barred cities from jailing homeless when no other alternatives are available.
I don't pretend to know what the solution to homelessness is, but I think we need to at least discuss whether a person who is homeless due to mental disfunction can simultaneously be mentally sound enough to decide for themselves to live on the street. I think "respect their decision to live on the streets" lets us avoid making tough decisions about how to help people who are impaired from helping themselves.
Note that I'm only referring to people who are homeless due to mental illness, not due to other factors (domestic abuse, job loss, etc.).
Furthermore, one isn't likely to create a community that does allow dignity for all, without first winning the hearts and minds of the less-than-compassionate members of the public. And one isn't likely to win those people over by pooping on their doorstep.
Why bother trying to have dignity if the world doesn't want to let you have any?
(Of course it's not so simple.)
I don't see how a homeless person would be able to use an establishment's bathroom more than once without being kicked out. Some places even hired security guards to stand outside of bathrooms and check receipts before allowing you to use them.
anecdote time: i had one a block from where i was living, and a block from a grocery store - while checking out, a very desperate person charged up complaining that the grocery store bathroom had been locked for too long. trying to be helpful, I mention the portland loo a block away only to be yelled at by the complainant. it was then that i figured out that the desire for the restroom wasn't for bodily waste elimination (portland loo's have a timer to stop drug use and prostitution in them).
as an aside, the portland loo's are some of the cleanest and best maintained public restrooms i've used - when given the choice between a "standard" restroom and a portland loo, such as on the waterfront, i choose the loo.
However, using Google Maps, I found 4. I'm not sure how many bathrooms you'd normally allocate per person, but I imagine the number of homeless and those out and about would necessitate more than that. How many bathrooms per person are in the typical office building? Should the number of these loos not similarly match the homeless population?
Also, how is a timer in a bathroom at all dignified? If I need 15 minutes to relieve myself, will the Portland Loo kick me out?
i'm not sure how long the timer is, maybe you can try one and let us know?
my point was that even when restrooms are provided, there are still large problems with defecation. my favorite instances were people pooping on the building housing the (open and available) restrooms, instead of entering the building in a small 1/4 block park - the whole park is now fenced off (there is a Portland Loo one block away, not to mention the bathrooms in the building that was being defecated on - now those restrooms are closed for all).
editing to add that a previous reply also talked about being able to choose between other public restrooms and the portland loo, so not sure why you would think there are no restrooms available.
I'd argue enough restrooms are provided when the number is population appropriate and within a one block distance.
I also didn't say that restrooms aren't provided, but it seemed like it wasn't obvious to everyone why inconvenience or lack of dignity leads to non-use.
the part of this discussion that i have taken part in has been around portland, where blocks are very small, but as noted before even where there are restrooms at more than one per block, there was pooping on the building instead of entering the building - so i'm not sure what would be a "proper" number of bathrooms at that point. at some point, you need to start looking at what other problems can be and look at other ways to solve the problem.
and no, i don't have that solution.